The Hallowed Ground Of Speed

Crossing into a military facility at 2:30 a.m. is a thrill most civilians never experience. Just driving up to the gate of a secured compound the size of Rhode Island was intimidating, and when the soldiers at the guard house asked us to pull our vehicle into their holding lot -- we complied without question -- we’d just rolled onto sacred hot rod land.

The quest for speed and performance has thrived in the deserts north of Los Angeles for decades. First on the vast, flat lakebed of Muroc in piston-powered cars, and then in the air above it with rocket-fuel-fed crafts designed to test the physical limits of man and machine. Although cars no longer race on its soil, hot rodding has not left this land; it’s just gotten faster and higher in elevation. This permanent shrine to speed, a place that honors all the mile-per-hour milestones man has ever reached, is know as Edwards Air Force Base.

I’d been invited to Edwards to see an experimental space shuttle built by Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNCorp.com), made of carbon fiber and titanium, and known as the Dream Chaser. Classified as a “lifting body,” this nearly wingless vehicle is a third the size of the space shuttles NASA retired in 2011. The Dream Chaser’s smaller scale will allow it to be mounted atop an Atlas V rocket and launched vertically, and like nearly every vehicle built to break the sound barrier and go into space, the Dream Chaser underwent its first tests at Edwards.

Under the cover of darkness, we met our NASA attaché and made our way from the North Gate of Edwards to the Dryden Flight Research Center that’s part of the Edwards complex. Though it was the middle of the night and the base was operating with a skeleton crew, the place was still humming with a high-tech energy. Edwards is a serious place, sectioned off with gates, key codes, and restricted access signs that compartmentalize the people that work there into groups as stringent and well defined as SCTA classes during Speed Week.

After passing through our third checkpoint, we met up with Sierra Nevada Corporation’s engineers in front of a massive hangar. We were instructed not to get within 30 feet of the Chaser and not to take any photos of the rear of the craft.

At 4:00 a.m., a member of the Air Force drove us out onto runway 04R/22L, as just moving across Edwards’ taxiways requires an even higher level of security clearance. The Sierra Nevada Corp. crew had to prep the Dream Chaser for its first brake tests, because before the craft would be allowed to go fast, the team had to prove to NASA that it could steer and stop itself autonomously.

As I stood on the runway built for the space shuttle to land on, looking west past a supersonic B1 bomber, I found myself listening for sonic booms, the roar of the Budweiser Rocket, and the rumble of flatheads from the past.